Scottish Man Survived 382 Days on Nothing But Tea, Coffee, and Vitamins, Dropped from 456 Pounds to 180

She was 27 years old, admitted to the hospital for a short medically supervised fast, and simply refused to stop. By the time the doctors allowed him to eat again, he had gone a year and 26 days without eating a single meal.

Angus Barbieri’s first meal after fasting was a boiled egg and a piece of buttered bread, eaten at 10 AM on July 11, 1966. “I’ve forgotten what food tastes like,” he told reporters and photographers who had gathered to watch him eat. “It went down well. I feel full but I really enjoyed it.”

Before fasting, his weight was running his life. On the 1961 trip to Wembley Stadium, a group of people had to pick him up and drag him through the door of the bus, and he couldn’t get through the entrance to the stadium, so the police let him in through the gate.

He entered Maryfield Hospital in Dundee in June 1965 aged 27. The doctors planned a short fast and chose to do so, but Barbieri continued because he had trained well and wanted to hit his goal weight. He quit his job at his father’s fish and chip shop to avoid temptation, and the shop closed during Lent. Finally he lost his appetite.

For most of those 382 days he stayed at home, for outpatient appointments and blood and urine tests. He lived on vitamins, electrolytes, yeast, and calorie-free drinks like tea, coffee, and plain water, although in the last weeks he added milk or sugar occasionally. A stool test was not taken, but it was reported that he reached 48 days between them.

When he hit 180 pounds on July 1, 1966, doctors spent the next 10 days easing him back onto a salty and then sugary diet before solids, which is why some sources record the fast as 392 days instead of 382. He celebrated by going to Spain for three weeks.

Guinness recognized it as the longest fast recorded in 1971, and as of 2026 he still holds the record for the longest fast without solid food. A 1973 study found that he settled at a healthy 196 pounds and concluded that fasting had no ill effects.

Nothing is guaranteed to come close under the same conditions. Therapeutic fasting for obesity in the 1960s and 1970s extended to 200 days for a few patients, with at least one documented death during breastfeeding, but nothing like Barbieri. Dennis Galer Goodwin went about 385 days on hunger strike in prison in 1973, but he was given energy through a tube, so Guinness considers it a different category. Bobby Sands, a famous political activist, died at 66 days old in 1981.

The Instagram and TikTok version of this is almost entirely fictional. Accounts often claim 30, 60, 100 day fasts, sometimes “dry fasts” without water, often attached to a supplement, training program, or detox pitch. There are no medical records, Guinness no longer follows the category because it promotes unsafe behavior, and doctors raise the alarm in general: eating without a camera, “fasting” that silently includes juice or broth, and no blood work. Refeeding syndrome alone can kill someone who does what these videos say.

He moved to Warwick, married, and had two sons. Barbieri died in 1990 after a brief illness at the age of 51.

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